Fediverse

Well the "federated" feed is similar to /r/all, that's a useful feature imo. The local feed has no equivalent because it relies on the concept of instance.

Users are empowered to set what they want their default homepage view to be ("Subscribed" , "All", or "Local"). I am unsure what the default is, but mine is set to "Subscribed" which I think it makes the most sense for most users.

Unless you are on a heavily moderated/defederated server (such as beehaw) whose moderation policies, politics, etc. you are aligned with it is very likely that "All" is going to contain something that someone doesn't like. I am personally not in favor of over-policing what users do outside the confines of their home instance, it's a fine line that I haven't had to define too clearly yet so perhaps my thoughts here will change.

If you don't like what's in "Local", then to me that is a sign that the instance isn't for you. Local is a reflection of the sort of content that users on that instance want to see more of. The admin allowing such content is not necessarily an endorsement (unless they were the one to actually post it), but is tacit acceptance of that content and the community that content exists in.

I think some way to make a "Curated" feed of posts only from certain approved communities would be a welcome feature and present a useful middle ground allowing for a moderatable discovery experience, like the default subscriptions provided on that other site.

And whats the difference between your public Lemmy home and Reddit's r/all, or the trending Youtube and Twitter sections? The internet is not only things you want to see.

I will say as well that email is far from perfect federation.

Try running your own mail server. Giants like Google and Microsoft make it hard to impossible to get through their span filter sometimes.

That's a bit like comparing a newspaper to private letters.

I think Lemmy is more like a newspaper with comment section. You chose which newspaper to subscribe to based on the overall editorial decisions, but it is better when it includes articles about things you were not previously aware off anyway. These articles usually come from other sources that your newspaper includes via an agreement with a news agency like Reuters.

Sure, sometimes getting to know about something you disagree with can be drama inducing, but ultimately it is a collective learning process that society needs I think.

I don't know if the capability is already available but maybe there should be a greater emphasis on "public" vs "private" communities. Public communities could be like e.g. "memes", whereas private ones could be local chat communities. Public ones would be available to everyone to browse and comment on, whereas private ones would only be available to yiffit.net users (and maybe whitelisting by server e.g. @pawb.social, or by requesting a per-user invite? though per-user invites would take a lot of extra effort to manage. Maybe a way to assign a user a "role" to access a group of communities, so you could give a "verified" role and be able to access current and new local chat channels.)

I think there's a lot of value in keeping private communities private and distinct from the larger fediverse. If I understand correctly, this seems to be sort of what beehaw.org is attempting to do. We recently had a bunch of trolls in one of pawb.social's meta announcement threads - why do random users need to be able to participate in our local announcements?

As a "fediverse" I understand the desire to be a giant meshnet of redundant servers, but maybe we can also have a return to the days of old with distinct local forums as well, running alongside that meshnet. Sometimes I would really like to be able to join a community and have it be a verified community, instead of just a topic that has regulars hanging around.

OK, been looking at this thread and one thing jumps at me: are we reinventing commercial social media algorithms from first principles here?

Perhaps there should be a new default feed that only features posts from communities that 'x' number of users have a subscription to, with 'x' being scalable with userbase. Also the aggregate user's community subscription count could be used to influence the sort order for that feed and bring more popular content closer to the top. Of course there will still be diverseness amongst users in even the smallest userbase, but maintaining a blacklist of communities against a feed curated by user subscriptions would surely be easier than maintaining a blacklist against the raw feed from other instances.

One thing I worry about is finding new communities. If I understand correctly the federated feed only shows posts from communities that other users have previously searched for? If so that leaves new community discovery solely up to word of mouth or searching using external websites. Perhaps each lemmy instance could ask it's peers for a list of their top subscribed communities from their instance by the users on that instance, and then start pulling posts from those top communities and adding them to the 'all' version of the federated feed. That should give existing and new users a (hopefully) mostly decent feed of the top communities from other instances to find content and communities from.

unless a relay is used

What do you mean by that?